Before it was forced to finally relent, the Bush Administration spent years breaking the law, even defying the orders of federal judges, in refusing to declare whether the polar bear would be protected under the Endangered Species Act. Other arctic marine mammals have gotten the stiff arm treatment as well. The ribbon seal was supposed to receive a determination on whether it would be listed as a protected species back in March. That was a deadline mandated by the law, but the Bush Administration just ignored the law. The ribbon seal’s status still has not been decided.
Now, yet another Arctic marine mammal, the Cook Inlet beluga whale, is being refused the Endangered Species Act decision it is legally entitled to. A petition was filed way back in 2006, requesting that the Cook Inlet beluga whale be considered for protection. That decision was legally required to be granted by April 20 this year.
The Department of Commerce intervened, insisting upon a six month extension of the decision, saying that time was needed to clear up scientific uncertainty about the Cook Inlet belugas. However, there is a great deal of doubt that the supposed scientific uncertainty is credible.
Why are all these marine mammals in the Arctic being denied proper consideration under the Endangered Species Act? I’ll give you a clue: It has something to do with a substance that’s oily, and its name rhymes with dude broil.
Give up? Okay, I’ll give you the answer: It’s the belief that there might be a lot of untapped oil in the Arctic. Big oil companies, to whom the current executive branch in the federal government is beholden, don’t want to let a bunch of endangered animals to get in the way of their claims to these resources.
The trouble is that those Arctic petroleum resources may not be nearly as extensive as many politicians in Congress have claimed. Big oil’s defenders have been claiming that one quarter of the world’s untapped deposits of petroleum lie within the Arctic, but it seems that the statistic is in error, a miscalculation that began with a journalist’s mistake. So, it seems likely now that there are much fewer petroleum deposits, or smaller deposits, than the big oil boosters have been promising.
